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Who is this guy?

Jason Freyer is a youth pastor at Westminster Presbyterian Church in Pittsburgh, PA. He enjoys his job so much that he has decided to spend countless hours of his free time writing about it in the new modern medium of weblog, or blog. That brings us here. Welcome to the blog of J, or in its condensed version, J-Blog. Jason writes this blog to be by youth pastors, for youth pastors, but watch with amazement as he dives into other topics as worship leading, preaching, politics, the Pittsburgh sports scene, or whatever else happens to be on his mind. Jason lives with his wife Sarah and their two dogs Marley and Melvin. This is some of the finest third person writing he's done in a while.

Good morning again bloggers! Today there will be a bunch of posts, to keep with my new years resolution of blogging more. If they bother you, don't read them. But totally read this one.

A couple of months ago my pastor and I were in our annual staff review, and we were talking about how you measure success in youth ministry. A lot of times, people want to take the easy way out and count things. You're successful if you have a great number of students, and it grows from week to week. Sometimes that's helpful, but not always. Sometimes it's just flat wrong. I've seen incredibly healthy and incredibly small youth ministries. I've also seen incredibly big youth ministries that have no depth at all, they're just big pizza parties. So my pastor challenged me to find new ways to measure our success at Veritas.

One of the things I have been considering along those lines is how comfortable I feel letting the students lead their own events. If they're truly latching on to what we're teaching and what we're all about, then they should be able to turn that around and teach it or be about it themselves. And last night, that's exactly what they did.

Our student leadership team was in charge of our prayer stations last night. They have been planning for months how they would execute five different prayer stations around the church, and they did it with flying colors! They even met a few times on their own, without Ed or I knowing about it! And apparently, the Facebook message stream is remarkable.

Our numbers were actually down a little bit last night (curse you winter sports!), but if you ask me, it was one of our greatest successes. If you're one of our student leaders reading this, way to be! If you're a youth pastor reading this, take some time to ask yourself what you could put your students in charge of this month. Let go of some control, and let the kids have a piece of your ministry. You'll be glad you did.